Linked by Andy Roberts on Thu 16th Jun 2005 19:50 UTC
I've been fortunate enough recently to be in contact with Steve Northover. Despite him being very busy with SWT and the forthcoming release of Eclipse, I've managed to grab some of his time to answer some of my questions. To clarify from the outset, the views expressed by Steve are his own and not those of his employer.
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"When we started SWT, I promised myself I was not going to build a gigantic, unmanageable, programming mess."
The road to bloatware is paved with...
Try having a beginner use SWT/JFaces/Eclipse/etc to actually write an application and you will be stunned as to how impossible it is.
While SWT certainly is miles beyond AWT, it is still mired in bad design that did not scale up beyond simple widgets at all well -- and also stymied by Java's horrible architecture and myopia when it comes to interfacing with native platforms.
After all these years, Sun Java still does not have transparent COM support, transparent Win32 support, transparent .NET support, etc. This lack of native platform support makes writing "nice" Java client applications ... something which will never happen.
No one can argue with the popularity of Eclipse. It is the only free IDE that has a lot of features. But it is steadily collapsing under its own weight. Which makes it suited only for corporate IT worker units who are trolling away on some giant outsourced project where personal productivity and elegance does not matter.
IBM is going to wake up in a few years and wonder what happened. Building a giant Titanic of a Java IDE is going to turn out badly. It may be big iron, but it is not strong iron.